Gandhi, Agriculture, Justice: Bill Hulet
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How many of you have seen pictures of Gandhi spinning thread on a
wheel? Of course, most of you have. The image is so ingrained in our
minds that when I was a child my older sister told me that the wheel
on the Indian flag represents Gandhi's spinning wheel. (Actually,
it's the buddhist symbol for the wheel of the dharma---the emblem
of India's first king, Ashoka.) But since I suspect that most of you
have probably never heard about why the Mahatma spent so much time
spinning thread, I thought I'd briefly explain that and draw some
parallels to farming.
People usually don't realize that Gandhi had an economic worldview
to go along with his ideas about religion and politics. But in a very
honest and humble way he was the first person to develop a critique
of the Western notion of "development" and a new understanding
of the economy that would eventually become known as "small is
beautiful". As such, he was a grand parent to all the Green Parties
around the world.
Because of his close connection to the humble people of India, Gandhi
had a visceral understanding of the village economy that was totally
absent from most of the other Congress Party leaders. Traditionally,
the people of India wore clothes made of a hand-made cloth known as
"kadi". This cloth was woven by agricultural day-labourers
during the rainy season---when there was no work for them in the fields.
In Gandhi's time people were quickly giving up kadi in favour of machine
made cloth from the looms of England. This was driving the rural poor
into utter destitution because it meant that there was no longer any
way they could support themselves during the rainy season.
The Indian upper class could understand that trade with England was
draining off India's hard currency and preventing the emergence of
Indian industry. That is why they supported a campaign to ask all
Indians to burn their English cloth and only buy Indian-made materials.
That was economic nationalism and it made perfect sense to them. Gandhi
took the issue one step further and argued that the location of a
mechanical loom didn't make any difference to an agricultural worker.
Whether it was in Liverpool or Bombay---she still starved to death
if it deprived her of a livelihood. To draw people's attention to
this fact, the Mahatma refused to wear anything except kadi and constantly
spun thread which he sold to handweavers at what he considered a just
price. Gandhi believed that the only way social justice could come
to an independent India was by leaving space for a village-based,
handi-craft economy.
I suppose that some of you are thinking that Gandhi was a noble man,
but unrealistic. How could he think that India could somehow hold
back "progress"? I can only surmise that because he lived
with the poor, travelled with the poor and lived---to some extent---like
the poor, he couldn't forget about them. (In his writings he refers
to them as the "skeletons".) If you actually open up your
heart to the poor and oppressed, their individual lives become more
important than abstractions like "progress" and "the
law of supply and demand". It was as if Gandhiji could not wear
machine made cloth because he could see the misery that was woven
into its very fabric.
Canada is not a Third World country, which means that it can be even
harder to believe that the choices we make in our individual lives
can lead to very bad things happening in the lives of others. The
modern economy builds a wall between ourselves and the people who
serve us. Unless we make a conscious effort to educate ourselves about
the consequences of our choices it is easy to participate in everyday
crimes against humanity without even knowing what we do. This gets
me back to tonight's main topic, which is our food and where it comes
from.
The iconic image we retain of farming is that of a handicraft industry.
That is to say, small plots of land with a variety of livestock and
crops. The farm most city people think of is "Old MacDonald's",
with pigs, cows, chickens, sheep and goats. This method of farming
is under attack all over the world and has been pretty much replaced
with an industrial model. Industrial farming is governed by the same
processes as a factory: ownership by huge corporations, large specialized
operations, division of labour between thinkers and workers, and so
forth. This has all sorts of implications for the environment and
the health of consumers, but I want to focus on the lives of the people
who work as labourers on industrial farms.
Let's start with an example from the Third World. In his book
Out of Poverty: and into something more comfortable, John
Stackhouse devotes a chapter to the Bangladesh shrimp industry.
In it he describes the utter destitution it has created among the
small land owners and tenant farmers who were displaced by shrimp
farms. People who used to be able to raise their own food, build their
own homes, and gather firewood have been reduced to squatting in huts
on the banks of dams between the flooded fields. If they do have access
to a little land, the salt from the shrimp farms kill their gardens
and the trees that supply fuel. The men and children move to the cities
to work as coolies, women get jobs at starvation wages catching shrimp
fry or sorting adult shrimp. Stackhouse says that this same process
has been at work all over Asia.
The ecological destruction continued in Thailand,
Vietnam,
Malaysia, and later China, as large food producers moved
from country to country, eager to keep Western freezers
stocked. It was only the thousands of small farmers who
suffered, stuck as they were with enormous debts, lost
incomes and land laced with salt, lime, urea phosphate and
other chemicals. (pp.198-199)
Nothing quite so stark has taken place on Canadian farms, but much
the same process has been at work here. In the last 25 or so years
there has been a dramatic decline in family-owned, mixed farms. Those
farms that still exist get larger and larger, and more and more specialized.
Increasingly farms depend on hired hands to get the work done (when
I was young very few farms were large enough to justify paid employees).
The trend is quite clear and has even been articulated. One economist's
report to the US department of agriculture states that in his opinion
American agriculture should be consolidated to the point where there
would eventually only be 250 farms left in the USA. Of course, they
would be enormous industrial enterprises on the scale of Tyson Farms
and Cargill.
This "consolidation process" is not a painless exercise.
Peasants develop a very strong bond to the soil, one that city dwellers
probably will never be able to understand. I have not set foot on
my family's old farm for over twenty years, yet I can still tell you
where every wet spot, vein of clay, gravel or sand was in our fields.
I can also tell you where the sugar maples grow, the elderberries
thrive, the oaks stand, etc. When we had to sell out I cried more
than when my father died. The process drove a wedge between my mother,
older brother and myself that we have only recently been able to heal.
This stress of "agricultural consolidation" has played itself
out all over Canada in the form of suicides, marriage break-ups, physical
and emotional abuse, alcoholism and so on. One doesn't have to be
dirt poor in order to suffer.
As if it isn't enough that we are destroying the class of independent,
family-owned, small farmers; this consolidation has created a horrifying
change in the quality of life for those few who do "succeed"
and stay on the land. My parents used to talk about livestock in a
way that I could never understand. It seems that when they were young
many people in their parent's generation developed a relationship
with their horses that I could only marvel at. For these folks, when
a horse became too old to work they didn't immediately send it off
to be rendered into glue, but instead literally "put it out to
pasture". That is, they fed and took care of it until it died---even
though it was no longer able to do any productive work. I found this
absolutely dumb-founding, as my brother and I treated our livestock
totally like they were machines to be used and abused however we saw
fit and with only their profitability at issue.
The thing to remember about modern factory farms is that they are
concentration camps and modern methods have reduced farmers to the
level of SS Guards. This analogy is quite precise and accurate. If
you look at the illnesses that livestock suffer from, they are exactly
the same as those that inmates of Bergen-Belson and Auswitze suffered:
viral pneumonia, mental retardation through under-stimulation, ulcers,
cannabilism, etc.
(As an aside, many of you might remember the humane society's recent
petition drive to have "puppy mills" outlawed. The reason
the government will not pass a cruely to animals law that would effectively
put puppy mills out of business is because any such legislation would
also be applicable to factory farms.)
Moreover, I believe that if you take a man and progressively force
him to routinely brutalize animals through forcible confinement in
filthy conditions, with bad air, incredible over-crowding, etc, you
desensitize him towards inflicting suffering on others. Police tell
us that many mass murderers are people who started out torturing animals.
I can only shudder to think about how many tortured souls we are creating
through industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture has taken what
used to be one of the most healthy ways of making a living and made
it a living Hell.
There is a bright light at the end of this tunnel, however. The fastest
growing part of the food industry is organic. And most organic food
is grown through small-scale, family run businesses. Old MacDonald
is making a come back---but now he grows tofu and does companion planting!
It isn't enough, however, to simply buy organic. We also need to purchase
local food and develop a connection with the people who grow it. So
try to avoid shopping at large grocery stores and instead try to connect
with Community Shared Agriculture, the local farmer's market or independent
health food stores. The important point is to remember what effect
your food choices have on the lives of the people who grow it. Like
Gandhi, try to make sure that nothing you wear or eat adds to the
store of misery in this world.
Thank you, and walk lightly on this beautiful earth.
Bill Hulet is the editor of "The Ontario Green News".
He gave this address as an introduction to a Slow Food event held
in Guelph in November 2002.
Issue
1, Volume 1